Old Man Trump Makes Karoline Leavitt Answer a Question for Him

Donald Trump is apparently not the point person on his own administration’s policy.

In the past 24 hours, the president has repeatedly deferred questions about the mechanics of his government to his foot soldiers, deflecting the responsibilities and duties that he campaigned three times (and at one point allegedly conspired) to acquire.

During an Oval Office press briefing Friday, Trump called on his press secretary Karoline Leavitt to answer a question about rising prices and affordability in his stead.

“We did a great job on groceries and affordability. The only problem is the fake news, you people don’t want to report it. And in fact, I’d like to ask Karoline—where’s Karoline? I’d like to ask Karoline a question,” Trump said.

But Leavitt was outside the room.

“She deserted me,” Trump wailed to laughter from the room, but eventually she returned.

“Karoline, could you discuss that question that was asked and how it was asked in such a fake, disgusting manner by the fake news?” Trump said.

“Yeah, I just saw.… Very unfortunate that the reporter refused to address, sir, what you just said,” Leavitt said, beginning a long scolding for the attending media outlets. “Which is that you inherited the worst inflation crisis in modern American history and you are fixing it in 10 short months, and your entire administration has been tasked with this effort.”

The relationship between Trump and Leavitt seems to be backward: Leavitt is supposed to elevate Trump’s original positions as his press secretary, not the other way around. But it’s not even the first instance this week in which Trump has opted out of functioning as the president.

During a White House meeting with Central Asian leaders Thursday night, a sleepy Trump tapped Vice President JD Vance to speak in his stead on the topic of Kazakhstan joining the Abraham Accords—though that may have actually saved face for the administration, since the president clearly doesn’t know how to pronounce Kazakhstan.

Cornell University has completely bent the knee to the Trump administration, making massive cultural and financial concessions in the process so it can get federal funding back.

On Friday, the university announced that it will pay the Trump administration $30 million over three years for reasons unspecified. It will also invest $30 million in “programs that incorporate AI and robotics, such as Digital Agriculture and Future Farming Technologies.”

Aside from those millions of dollars it’s shelling out, Cornell has agreed to hold “annual surveys to evaluate the campus climate for Cornell students, including the climate for students with shared Jewish ancestry,” to seek out “experts on laws and regulations regarding sanctions enforcement, anti-money laundering, and prevention of terrorist financing,” and hand over “anonymized” undergraduate admissions data directly to the federal government.

The agreement will also see Cornell provide staff with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s “Guidance for Recipients of Federal Funding Regarding Unlawful Discrimination,” an anti-woke catchall memo designed to force universities to broadly pull back any kind of diversity, equity, and inclusion–adjacent policy and make culture-war-obsessed right wingers feel better about themselves.

Bondi’s memo declares that “using race, sex, or other protected characteristics for employment, program participation, resource allocation, or other similar activities, opportunities, or benefits, is unlawful.” It additionally bans race-based scholarships, trans people in collegiate sports, and cultural training of any kind.

“The months of stop-work orders, grant terminations, and funding freezes have stalled cutting-edge research, upended lives and careers, and threatened the future of academic programs at Cornell,” university President Michael Kotlikoff wrote in an email to the student body.

This extortion is a result of a monthslong, all-out crackdown on universities and any speech that the Trump administration deems left-wing. Dangling federal funding in the face of schools unless they cave to very narrow, very biased demands will only lead to suppression and resentment.

Donald Trump and his administration may be absent from COP30 climate talks in Belém, Brazil, but its attendees didn’t forget about him.

Several heads of state made speeches at the conference calling out the president by name, including many from South America. Colombian President Gustavo Petro, who compared Trump to Hitler at the U.N. earlier this year, said “Mr. Trump is against humankind,” while Chile’s president Gabriel Boric took aim at the president’s climate denialism.

“That is a lie,” Boric said about Trump calling climate change a “con job” and a “hoax made up by people with evil intentions.”

“We might have legitimate discussions about how to face these things, but we cannot deny them,” added Boric.

Some alluded to Trump without mentioning his name. Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s president and a target of Trump’s ire, criticized “extremist forces that fabricate fake news on climate for political gain, while French President Emmanuel Macron urged his fellow leaders to “support free and independent science.”

“We must choose multilateralism over isolationism, science over ideology, and action over fatalism,” Macron added. Paris was the location of a landmark climate deal 10 years ago, agreed to by 200 nations including the U.S. under President Obama, only for Trump to withdraw during his first term as president.

Joe Biden’s election and re-entry into the agreement was short-lived with Trump’s reelection, and the MAGA Republican surprised nobody by immediately undoing many of his predecessor’s climate efforts. Now, the U.S. under Trump refuses to be a part of climate solutions, while the rest of the world is still trying to mitigate the crisis.

President Donald Trump’s administration claims that its military strikes on foreign vessels that are allegedly smuggling drugs have targeted “unlawful combatants” engaged in an “armed conflict.” But the Associated Press reported Friday that this isn’t entirely true.

Since the beginning of September, the Pentagon has announced 17 military strikes against vessels around Latin America, summarily executing more than 66 alleged drug smugglers. The Trump administration has essentially declared war against foreign cartels it claims are “nonstate armed groups,” asserting that their transport of drugs constituted “an armed attack against the United States.”

But a handful of dead men identified by the AP weren’t so-called “narco-terrorists” or members of criminal gangs or cartels. And they were smuggling cocaine, not synthetic opioids responsible for killing tens of thousands of Americans every year.

One man killed in the first strike was Luis “Che” Martínez, a 60-year-old local crime boss who had previously been jailed for human trafficking charges. Although the Trump administration claimed that the 11 men killed were members of Tren de Aragua, Martinez’s relatives told AP that they did not believe he was a member of that gang.

Another man killed in a U.S. military strike on a vessel was Robert Sánchez, a 41-year-old fisherman and skilled boat pilot from a Venezuelan peninsula plagued by poverty. Despite the Trump administration’s claim that it was preventing the imminent transit of deadly drugs to the United States, the coastal area in Venezuela where Sánchez lived was a popular transit hub for cocaine headed for Europe. Cocaine, and other drugs bound for the United States, are typically moved through the Pacific Ocean.

Another man killed was Juan Carlos “El Guaramero” Fuentes, who’d turned to smuggling after the public bus he operated broke down and the government failed to fix it. Another was Dushak Milovcic, a 24-year-old drop-out of Venezuela’s National Guard Academy. Neither of them were gang members, either.

The AP’s latest findings are in line with previous disturbing admissions from the Pentagon, which told lawmakers that “they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessel to do the strikes,” and “could not satisfy the evidentiary burden” required to detain or prosecute crew members. The Pentagon also admitted that the only drug targeted in the strike was cocaine, “a facilitating drug of fentanyl.”

The Trump administration has claimed the strikes are an effort to curb drug smuggling. The government is also making plans to possibly expand its campaign to dry land—and its list of potential targets reportedly includes Venezuelan military sites.

Vice President JD Vance is blatantly attacking the Constitution’s separation of powers after a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to fully fund the Supplemental Assistance Nutrition Program.

Speaking in the White House Thursday, Vance called the ruling “absurd,” because “you have a federal judge effectively telling us what we have to do in the midst of the Democrat government shutdown.”

“What we’d like to do is to have the Democrats open up the government, of course, then we can fund SNAP, and we can also do a lot of other good things for the American people,” Vance said. “But in the midst of a shutdown, we can’t have a federal court telling the president how he has to triage the situation.”

It’s yet another attack on an independent judiciary from the White House, and came hours before the administration appealed the judge’s ruling Friday, with Justice Department lawyers asking for a pause.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell’s decision “has thrust the Judiciary into the ongoing shutdown negotiations and may well have the effect of extending the lapse in appropriations, exacerbating the problem that the court was misguidedly trying to mitigate,” DOJ lawyers argued. “This unprecedented injunction makes a mockery of the separation of powers. Courts hold neither the power to appropriate nor the power to spend.”

“There is no lawful basis for an order that directs USDA to somehow find $4 billion in the metaphorical couch cushions,” the lawyers wrote. Meanwhile, as the Trump administration refuses to fund a food program for the destitute, they continue to bail out foreign countries and make record military purchases, even as the government shutdown costs the U.S. billions of dollars. But apparently, it’s all the fault of Democrats and meddlesome judges.